Odd Lots

A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I’ll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you’ve seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.

This SSD might well make that seven-year-old PC a little bouncier…but I still recommend maxing out RAM to 4 GB, cleaning the registry, and getting rid of crapware. I’m less convinced than some people that hard drive speeds are a serious bottleneck when your registry looks like an empty lot in a war zone.

I doubt that this would ever work, irrespective of its cool halfway-to-dieselpunk looks. It does make me wonder what other cool stuff might have been drowned out in the racket coming from WWI. (Thanks to Gary Kato for the link.)

And I know damned well that this wouldn’t work, but it goes all the way to full-bore, balls-out dieselpunk fantasy. (Thanks again to Gary Kato.)

Eric S. Raymond has been discussing the ethics and practicalities of Google’s “no handles” rule.

Also, there is a Venezuelan affairs blog called “The Devil’s Excrement”, which is what a Venezuelan statesman once called petroleum.

The “Gustav” may have been the largest-caliber cannon ever built, but in the general category of size, it has a few competitors. Ever heard of the
“V-3″? (Also known as the “Tausendfussler” – millipede). It was a fixed gun 130 meters long, with many branching combustion chambers to sustain acceleration of the shell. It was only 6″ in caliber though.

It has its moments, granting that I’ve been on it for only a little more than a week. I’m still trying to figure how best to use the Circles metaphor. I’ll write about it more once I’ve had more experience with it and thus more to say. So far, not bad.